In conjunction with the “It Happened at Pomona” exhibition and as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, “Performance at Pomona” consists of a series of three performance pieces by artists represented in each of the three segments of the exhibition.

Preparation F, a 1971 performance by John White John White staged two performances in 1971 at Pomona College at the invitation of Helene Winer: Preparation F and Wooded Path. White has made a significant contribution to California art for more than four decades as an innovative and highly respected performance artist, accomplished painter, sculptor, and teacher. The night of the performance in 1971, the football team entered the site in street clothes, carrying their uniforms. They then proceeded to undress, then dress again in their football uniform, and scrimmage in the gallery. This historic performance will be re-created at Pomona, in Memorial Gym.

A Butterfly for Pomona, a new pyrotechnic performance by Judy Chicago This new pyrotechnic performance by Judy Chicago is inspired by her 1970 Atmosphere performance at Pomona College. This new work returns to the series of environmental/performance works, called Atmospheres, that she staged around California between 1969 and 1974. These works combined commercial fireworks and road flares in ephemeral “paintings” of colored smoke that hovered and dissipated in air currents. Chicago explained the work as a way to soften and feminize the environment. These works may be seen as a bridge between earlier conceptual minimalist work and her later socio-political figurative work.

Burning Bridges, a recreation of JamesTurrell’s 1971 flare performance This event recreates James Turrell’s 1971 flare performance. In 1971, he staged Burning Bridges, a work utilizing highway flares in and around the arcaded façade of Bridges Auditorium, the central building on Marston Quad at Pomona College. At dusk, students (who were already in place in the alcoves) lit orange flares simultaneously. Almost immediately, the building was aglow with a brilliant orange hazy light and smoke.

“Performance at Pomona” is free and open to the public. An information booth will be hosted from 3-7 p.m. in the Pomona College Museum of Art. Free parking is available in Pomona College campus lots and street parking along Bonita Avenue and College Avenue. Handicapped parking is available on 4th Street near Bridges Auditorium. Food provided by Pomona College Catering will be available for purchase along Stover Walknear Marston Quad. Please call 909-621-8283 for more information. “Performance at Pomona” is generously supported by The Getty Foundation and the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation.

The Experimental Impulse explores the pivotal role of experimentation in Los Angeles in the years immediately following the city’s emergence as a vital artistic center. The exhibition offers new insights into the understanding of developments in critical art practice after 1965 and bridges the gap between these histories and more recent approaches to artmaking. Consisting exclusively of reproductions and facsimiles of materials culled from publications, institutions, and personal collections, as well as a series of recent video and audio interviews conducted for the exhibition, The Experimental Impulse reflects on the networks of exchange and support structures that underlie the history of art in Los Angeles. With contributions by participants in “The Experimental Impulse” seminars at CalArts’ School of Art (2009/10 and 2010/11), the exhibition operates from a position that context informs content and develops an open-ended methodology that has been characteristic of CalArts since its founding. Conceived from the perspective of artists and art students who currently live and work in the city, the exhibition’s curatorial approach reexamines the very notion of historical representation and aims to embody the principles of experimentation.

In conjunction with the exhibition at REDCAT, East of Borneo, a collaborative art journal and multimedia archive, hosts a selection of commissioned essays, documentation, interviews and research materials related to the process of organizing The Experimental Impulse. Edited by Stacey Allan, this archival component to the exhibition offers an alternative immaterial approach to the role of catalogues and print publications.

Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980

Alternative Projections is a focused historical survey of experimental filmmaking in Los Angeles, particularly in the postwar era. The project will culminate in a series of approximately 16 screenings, which will explore the tradition of L.A. avant-garde filmmaking and how it related to other traditions such as painting, sculpture, performance art and dance. Canonical avant-garde works (films by Pat O’Neill, Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren) will be mixed with films that have had limited public screenings in Los Angeles since that period (Gary Beydler, Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren, Robert Nakamura, Sam Erenberg). In conjunction with the screening series, a media-rich website will be launched, including more than 40 newly created oral histories, as well as articles, archival materials, and filmographies of various artists.(Image: Foregrounds by Pat O’Neill 1978)

She Accepts the Proposition: Women Gallerists and the Redefinition of Art in Los Angeles, 1967-1978 is presented as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California – coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. Crossroads is the only K-12 institution invited to participate in Pacific Standard Time. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

“Angles Gallery is pleased to present Judy Fiskin: All Six Films, a retrospective of films (1997-2010) by renowned, Los Angeles-based artist Judy Fiskin, alongside a selection of her photographs from the series Dingbat (1982-83). The exhibition is presented in partnership with Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.

Judy Fiskin’s film titles include Diary of a Midlife Crisis (1997), My Getty Center (1999), What We Think About When We Think About Ships (2001), 50 Ways to Set the Table (2003), The End of Photography (2007), and Guided Tour (2010). Assembled for the first time in one venue, these works represent nearly two decades of the artist’s attention to her own imagination. Rather than “looking” at things, as she has done so methodically since the early 1970s, in her film and video works, Fiskin takes time to consider what can be described as our perceptions of things. Beginning in the mid-Nineties, the artist turned to the moving image to explore her own “creative process at a standstill” in Diary of a Midlife Crisis. As the Getty Center was opening in Los Angeles, the infamous El Nino also hit our droughty shores, both generating an avalanche of media hype, captured in My Getty Center. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned What We think About When We Think About Ships for a special exhibition at LACMA Lab. In the new millennium, she turned her attention to cultural ritual, examining a table setting competition at the Los Angeles County Fair in 50 Ways to Set the Table. By the end of the aught decade, Fiskin began to consider The End of Photography in an examination of the demise of film, paralleled by the disappearance of the vernacular landscape of Los Angeles. Lastly, in Guided Tour, the artist critiques the guided viewing of art. Fiskin uses super-8 film, as well as video and digital-video, with sound.

In Judy Fiskin’s photographs, each series by the artist assembles a formal analysis of its subject, organizing elements of pattern and form into a taxonomical study. Fiskin characterizes her photographs by the use of small-scale (each image is approximately 2-3/4 inches square), and bright white paper to emphasize the dark border of the exposed negative. The resulting prints present an ephemeral moment in the mind of the artist: not as a representation of time and place, but as a gem to be consumed like the image of a memory. The series Dingbat examines the architectural vernacular of small apartment houses unique to Southern California, presenting the viewer with a dizzying array of pattern and geometry. At once distinct and generic, the images create an uncanny sense time and place, deeply rooted in the Los Angeles landscape.Judy Fiskin’s work is included in four Pacific Standard Time exhibitions: “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81,” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; “In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980,” at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973,” at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; and “Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center” at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles. Her video and photographic works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Dia Foundation, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Friends of Photography Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco; Castelli Photographs, New York; San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco; Kassel Film and Video Festival, Germany; Impakt New Media Festival, Utrecht, Holland; and The International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam. Fiskin has been awarded the “Best of Festival” award at the Berkley Film and Video Festival (1999), “The Silver Spire Award,” San Francisco International Film Festival (1998), the “Silver” award at Worldfest, Houston, TX (2000), and the “Bronze” award at Worldfest, Houston (1998). Fiskin earned her BA degree at Pomona College, Claremont, California and her MA degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches photography and video at the California Institute of the Arts. Fiskin lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011.

Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.”

1998. Diary of a Midlife Crisis (still from a digital video with sound), running time 16 minutes

-JO

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The MOVING INDEX is the current platform of ART OFFICE: seeking, sharing and promoting a community around time-based art. Our contributors are active artists and filmmakers around the world posting events, exhibitions, screenings, performances and ideas involving time and temporality. mailroom@artoffice.org